


Free Descent

by akitania (spacehairdresser)



Category: BIRDMEN - 田辺イエロウ | Tanabe Yellow
Genre: Battle Couple, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Loyalty, Nonverbal Communication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 10:25:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12274506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehairdresser/pseuds/akitania
Summary: We can’t all blow up buildings whenever someone makes us do something we don’t want,she said.The smile Bat turned at her wasn’t the same one as that day in Nevada, bright and shocked; it was just a thin white slit across his sharp face.Well, you have me now.





	Free Descent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pyrophane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrophane/gifts).



It was true that she’d never been afraid of him. Back in Nevada, there had been too many things to fear: the blackouts, the supervisors, the threat of awakening and what would come after. Another seraph was nothing, even Bat. Before he was brought to the Nevada farm, someone told her, he had beaten a supervisor half to death in Alaska. But the first day he was dropped into the gymnasium with the rest of them, while Robin skirted the edges of the room with watery joints, he decimated the blackout in seconds. _Incredible!_ Arthur had exclaimed, his huge blue eyes shining. _You’ve gotta be the strongest out of any of us!_

It startled a smile from Bat, bright and alien on his face.

Then Arthur was taken away. Bat was taken just weeks later — It was clear, to Robin at least, who had been keeping him in check. At the time, no one at the farm knew where either had went. Robin had hoped that, wherever they were, neither was alone.

Robin in Nevada had not known a thing about being alone. Or, while she was at it: afraid.

 

 _The old man keeps a sword in his cane,_  Rooster said through the airlog.

Robin and Bat exchanged a look. For his limping walk and the exhaustion in his eyes, Sanders was hardly old. Older than them, certainly, and Robin had thought of a dozen ways to take him down, but still. Kids.

(The truth: she still loved kids. She’d tried to make a clean break, not share a single thing with the silly, frightened girl who’d shut her eyes and trembled every time a monster crawled through a hole in the sky, but there were disconcerting areas of overlap. Rooster would fall asleep on her shoulder an hour into the plane ride, she knew, and she wouldn’t move, letting her arm spark with pins and needles.)

 _It’s true!_ Rooster insisted. _I saw him polishing it!_

“I hate planes,” Bat said. He had the window seat, and hadn’t stopped bouncing his leg the entire flight, his bare foot thunking against the wall. Why hadn’t they at least given him shoes for the flight? But then, Robin’s feet were tight and sore inside her sneakers; all the clothes the facility gave her hung wrong and itchy and made her sweat. She’d dress herself in wingmass all day if she had the choice. Bat, gazing out the window, continued hotly, “I can’t believe they stick us in a box to move us around when our whole point is _flying_.”

He had an absurd lack of patience for someone who had spent the last year in a cell. Maybe it was the zipties. Robin hated planes, too; her ears kept popping in a way that never did when she was flying, and being crammed between the two boys felt an awful lot like farm barracks.

“I think they’re going to be flying us around a lot,” Robin said. There were going to be more seraphim for her to sway, even if Sanders hadn’t said as much directly. She was going to have to do this again and again.

It would be ridiculous for her to be airsick, but she felt suddenly nauseous.

 _But they’re not controlling you at all_ , said Bat. Sarcasm, cynicism, came out wrong through alpha waves; they grated on her brain.

Rooster was about to stand up for her, leaning anxiously across her armrest, but she cut him off. _We can’t all blow up buildings whenever someone makes us do something we don’t want,_ she said.

The smile Bat turned at her wasn’t the same one as that day in Nevada, bright and shocked; it was just a thin white slit across his sharp face. _Well, you have me now._

 _I do_ , she said, so he wouldn’t think she was scared to acknowledge it. The nausea got worse, or maybe it was something else.

 

Her room in Virginia had last belonged to Arthur, but she only knew because Sanders told her when she commented on the scratched paint. It had been stripped of all personal effects, all identifiers, and she hadn’t found the time or motivation to change it. A room of one’s own — she’d seen the phrase before, because there was homework and required reading even here — a room of one’s own was a privilege of awakening. In between blackouts and history lessons and trigonometry, there were hours to kill and blank walls that were hers alone.

In Nevada, there had been free time, too, but no space. _Robin, put my hair in a bun. Robin, help me with these fractions! Robin, my shoulders hurt. Robin, tell me a story_. Free time, and she had known how to fill it, back when there were people to want her. _Robin!_

When one of the identical Eden men came in to pick up her homework — she couldn’t tell them apart, uniformly thin-faced and white-coated, but this one looked new — he told her that Bat had asked to see her. _Robin!_ Even now.

“Miguel would like to talk to you,” was what he actually said, and she just blinked at him for a moment while she tried to place the name. Then she stood to follow without saying a word.

She’d thought he’d have a room like hers, but it was a cell identical to the one where he’d been stored for a year in Maine. She hadn’t paid much attention to that farm, her stomach churning as she tried to prepare a winning argument to use against a berserker, but it occurred to her that it might have been built in replica of this. Or vice versa. A sterile set of doppelgangers, just like every man who came to bring her food and test her blood.

Bat was in his black armor, shriveled wings limp against his back, sitting hunched at the edge of his bed. He didn’t even look at her when she was allowed into the cell, so she sat beside him to demand his attention.

It worked, jolting him like a shock, and he gave her a hard look. “What, is this the seduction?”

Robin didn’t smile, but she wasn’t worried. “You’re the one who asked me here. What did you want?”

Bat slumped back, the shapeless protrusions on his back brushing against the wall. Even stunted as his wingmass was, Robin felt small in her sweatshirt and shorts and wished she had transformed. Too late now. “Tell me about the escape,” he said, low-toned. Outside the cell, the labcoat was watching more with boredom than suspicion, but still watching. Of course.

Robin reached up to Bat’s face, ready to show him, but he dodged in a swift motion. One hand snapped up as though to catch her wrist, but he stopped himself. His taloned fingers still curled in the air, centimeters from hers.

“ _Tell_ me,” he said, then added, “I agreed not to use the airlog while you’re here.”

_I didn’t agree to that._

He met her eyes. “Tell me.”

The moment came again, like when she’d first reined him in, that all the energy drained away. She sat back on the cot, legs curled, and the story coughed itself out. There was something compulsive in the telling, all flat details she was afraid to color. Arthur had come for them all (“He asked about you. Right away.”), they followed giddily, made dumb mistakes while drunk on their exodus, Arthur ignored his clearest warning, and then the planes came. She didn’t talk about the lake of stars, or the moment that Arthur took her hand. Her eyes were hot, and she tipped her chin up to fight gravity. She wouldn't cry.

When she chanced a look at Bat, though, he was staring with determination at the wall. For just a moment, she touched his shoulder, letting one memory pass: _it took one hand to hold the scissors and one to hold the unwashed clump of hair but she couldn’t move her left arm yet so it was just a clumsy motion of right hand cutting through unbraided right braid with a graceless twisting of wrist and elbow and in the mirror her face was so pale that the freckles looked grotesque it should have been Milan doing this oh Milan Milan Gabriel Canary Parrot Arthur Arthur Arthur—_

She’d thought Bat would move away, but he just made a low noise in his throat. She let go.

“When?” he asked, his voice barely distinguishable from the guttural sound. “When are you going to—” He still wouldn’t look at her, but he jerked his hand, and she had an idea of what he meant.

_Not yet. You know it can’t be yet._

“Why not?” It was just a challenge, no curiosity behind it. Robin scowled.

“I’m not battering down your mind every time I talk to you,” she said. The labcoat was looking in with a little more intent, knowing what they were doing. The men were not uniformly clever, but they were uniformly intelligent. This one might have been clever. _Don’t be dumb. We need allies._

 _You_ make _allies_ , Bat said, slipping into the airlog in spite of his promise, and _then_ he looked at her. _Well, you make followers, Robin. You’re not as nice as you used to be._

“Speak up,” snapped the pale-eyed man, finally getting bored or frustrated or afraid.

“It’s fine,” she said, standing. “I was just leaving.”

She watched the care with which he locked the door behind her, and the way Bat’s eyes never left her.

 

It was a misshapen beast, like most of them. Its limbs were all wings, not made to hold weight or fight within the boundaries of the training room, so it just shambled and lurched between the three of them, throwing its horned head.

Horned, or crowned, Robin realized.

Rooster, to her relief, had decided to keep in the air. His wings beat steadily, and he was probably trying to figure out how to dive-bomb the monster, but she and Bat could make quicker work of it. Children weren’t going to fight for her anymore.

 _Left_ , she told Bat, moving to the right flank. He shot her a look, but it lasted only a split second and then he twisted to strike the left wing-leg. She moved in perfect time, unbalancing the creature and raking talons along its back.

The force of Bat’s blow, though, nearly took her out with it. She snapped her wings out to break the momentum, curling her clawed toes into the floor. Biting back a curse, she threw her weight forward again to strike once more, sending the monster crumpling to the floor.

Two minutes, forty-six seconds.

She didn’t go to Sanders, and she only spared a glance to make sure Rooster was fine. She dropped, her weight suddenly too much.

 _It was Arthur_ , she said, not able to hold in the fear. _That was Arthur_. Crowned, winged, trapped.

 _Don’t be sad!_ Rooster descended on her, flung his short arms around her shoulders. _You did a really good job!_

That wasn’t the point, of course, but how would he know better? Robin regretted immediately saying anything he would hear, and patted his hands, clasped together over her chest. _Thanks, Rooster._

Bat was a thousand miles away. When she nudged him through the airlog, he just said, _You’re right. It was him._

 

There was a certain rhythm they followed, asking and accepting couriered invitations to visit, making promises of obedience they’d slip under. For their moments of actual secrecy, though, there needed to be a cover of actual, unremarkable conversation.

She would say: “Is your leg feeling better yet?”

He would say: “Don’t treat me like a little kid.”

She would say: “I’m not. It’s just a question. You were hurt.”

And then, frequently, the argument would spiral and they’d forget that in a moment of silence, they were supposed to be asking, _Have you found any blind spots in the security?_ instead of watching each other with something like cautious amusement.

 _You don’t need a blind spot_ , he did remind her, eventually. _You have me_.

So he kept saying. She picked at a wingtip and looked away.

“You really liked Arthur, didn’t you?” Bat asked a propos of nothing like whatever they’d been talking about before. They'd both known how to talk to people, once; she had a feeling they were forgetting.

She wasn’t going to lie. There was nothing left to preserve by it. “Yes.” Then, reckless, she reached out her hand.

Bat took it.

_He asked me to come away in the night and when we sat there I could hardly tell the sky above from the water below it was like a dream or like a hallucination like something you see in a painting and think has to be an exaggeration because nothing could be that beautiful but he held my hand and for exactly one night I didn’t hate myself I wasn’t ashamed of what a small and plain person I was._

“I’m—” But he didn’t finish the thought. “So. Bellwethers don’t just make you, like—” He gestured, confused, pulling a closed fist away from his chest. “What the fuck do you do to people?”

Robin shrugged.

“That’s how he was, even before — but you weren’t like that then.”

She dug her fingers into the mattress. Bat never sat on her bed when he was in her room, just curled cross-legged on the floor in front of her and looked at her like a puzzle that wasn’t coming together.

Only when the silence was broken by the parting of the door did she realize it was another lost moment of private communication.

It was Sanders, and he shut the door behind him.

“I don’t mean to infringe on your privacy,” he said blandly. “I just wanted to drop by, since the two of you have been spending a lot of time together.”

He paced forward, one, two steps — the room wasn’t large enough for much more, and then there was a blur of motion to fast for Robin to track. In the space of an instant, Sanders had pulled a _sword_ , why did he have a _sword_ , and Bat had moved to intercept it.

The blade had been coming for her throat, Robin realized too slowly. It stopped instead against Bat’s chest, and she couldn’t see whether there was anything to the hit, if there was blood, but she was moving before she had time to consider.

She’d meant to pin Sanders to the wall, but his bad leg went out and they both crashed to the floor, her wings spreading at the last moment to hold onto some semblance of balance. She couldn’t crush his will, she remembered, so it had to be physical; she siphoned wingmass into her fingers, letting the claws pierce through the shoulders of his jacket and reach skin.

“That wasn’t an attack,” he gasped, breath all gone. “I’m just here to warn you— if you’re planning anything stupid—”

 _I’ll get any guards,_ Bat said. She couldn’t look to check if he had been hurt, but through the airlog, his voice was clear.

She pulled back just a fraction, stopping herself from drawing blood, and told Bat, _Wait_. Then, to Sanders, she said, “Warning understood. Is mine?”

He seemed almost to laugh. “Yes, crystal clear. You’re assuaging my fears about your teamwork. I’ll keep this in mind.”

Before Robin could decide if she was ready to relent, Bat was beside her, kneeling, his shoulder brushing hers. He closed a hand around Sander’s throat, not to choke him but as an unsubtle warning.“If you hurt _any_ of us, I’ll rip your head off.”

There was no doubting him.

She touched Bat’s wrist, not to communicate anything more complicated than that he should _probably step off_. Like a slow release of breath, he stood and backed away, wings spread to their full, ragged extent. Robin stood too, yanking Sanders to his feet by his shirt collar.

While his mouth was by her ear, he whispered, “Good job making a team player out of him.”

She didn’t hit him. It was a victory. She let him go, watching him put his cane back in one piece and limp out the door while her fingers clenched and unclenched.

“I could’ve gotten rid of him.” Bat was still coiled to strike, rocking back and forth from the heels to the balls of his feet. “ _Shhh_ , just like that.” He raked his fingers across empty air.

“Yeah.” Someone would come for him. A guard to keep him locked tight until he was needed again.

Until the door opened again, she rested a hand on his arm and didn't say anything.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! This was a lot of fun to write; I also fell hard and fast for this pairing
> 
> although falling hard and fast has not, 
> 
> traditionally, 
> 
> ended well for birdkids.


End file.
